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This is the Court of Chancery. . . which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does not often give — the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”--Dickens, Bleak House

This is an opinion piece:[Why the Zimmerman ProsecutorsShould Be DisbarredAmerican Thinker, by Jack Cashill]

Comment: “They should be, but they won’t be. Not in this political climate and Mike Nifong is probably shaking his head saying I was born 6 years too soon!”----------------There have been many comparisons of the Zimmerman trial and the Duke Lacrosse case, but I thought this a good comment. My Nifong disgust has been renewed for the day.

From the Miami Herald. (Expect slow loading due to heavy web traffic.)

Will the jury's repudiation of the national media's Narrative cause any second thoughts about the press's prejudices that caused so many to get this story so wrong for so long? It would be nice to hope that this long, sad story at least causes a few people to notice the biases of the conventional wisdom.

I've been writing for years about what Tom Wolfe calls the "mania for the Great White Defendant." Here are some links to this recurrent phenomenon in fact and fiction:

Bonfire of the Vanities on the Great White Defendant

Duke Lacrosse Hoax

The Jena Six

Nestor Camacho in Tom Wolfe's Back to Blood

Quentin Unchained

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The KKK at Oberlin

Marco McMillian

Law & Order: the 100% irony-free Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe v. Dick Wolf

Chandra Levy and Rep. Gary Condit

Amanda Knox: The Hot White Defendant

Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman

The only way to have any effect on how more than few people are equipped to think about the world is to repeat yourself over and over.

Here's the paragraph where Wolfe introduced the concept in the Great New York Novel in 1987. Three assistant district attorneys are discussing a case that had interested the publicity-mad head D.A., known as Captain Ahab:

We have not yet had true justice – We have merely stopped ONE aspect of injustice. So long as these people remain in social, political, or legal power – No-One is safe from becoming the next George Zimmerman.

The Attention of A Nation Should Be Directed To The Fraud That Was The State Of Florida V. George Zimmerman: These Are The People Behind the Justice For Trayvon Martin™ Scheme Team agenda:

BTW, this article does not even mention Mr. Martin's text reference(s) to his fighting and his mother's worries about it, which (in addition to the gun stuff) is pretty plainly important exculpatory evidence for Mr. Zimmerman. So outrageous that this information was withheld. If the prosecutors do not have to face some ramifications (e.g., lose job, disbarment, something pretty significant), that will be quite a disgrace IMO.

Mr Pratillo, who recently retired after 45 years in the judiciary, said the Supreme Court had gone far beyond its correct remit by considering the evidence of the case, rather than just studying points of law.

"They should not have done that. It is not their job. Instead they evaluated the evidence. It is a serious mistake." The Supreme Court ordered a retrial in March and earlier this month released a 74-page document in which it explained its decision.

The court said that Meredith Kercher was killed by more than one person in what may have been a group sex game that spiralled out of control.

"How is it, if there had been a struggle and a thwarted erotic game in this small bedroom, perhaps an orgy that ended with Meredith being stabbed, there is not a single biological trace of Raffaele and Amanda? Whereas it is full of traces of Rudy Guede," said Mr Pratillo.

-----snip----

Indeed. How is it that "there is not a single biological trace of Raffaele and Amanda?"

Another "magic towel," perhaps. More than anything, this Supreme Court decision was made despite the Court of Appeals indicating there was plenty of reasonable doubt, which there most certainly was. Super crazy that one group of highly trained professionals can find reasonable doubt only to be rebuffed by yet another group of highly trained professionals that seems to be aligned politically with the original prosecution team. The new decision seems to be yet another politically motivated outrage.

It is utterly impossible to understand why the court would take the position that more than one person had to be involved, especially given the reliable DNA evidence or, in the case of Knox and Sollecito, the astonishing lack thereof, even though the crime occurred in a very small blood spattered room.

If you have a chance, pick up Amanda Knox's book, "Waiting to Be Heard." The description of the all night interrogation and its aftermath is a pretty valuable portrait of coerced "confessions."

Frank Sfarzo, an Italian, was the KC Johnson of the Knox/Sollecito case. Sfarzo had an absolutely amazing archive of beautiful and thorough material on the case that seems to have been removed from the Internet. The prosecutor, Mr. Mignini, has apparently sued Sfarzo for slander/libel in addition to having had him beaten up.

For the key component to the Brawley affair seemed to be not that Tawana or her advisors had lied, or the spectre of rape itself, but the widely held belief in the black community that the story was true-had to be true-even after the release of the grand jury report, even ten years later. One woman, Collette Wright, quoted in the New York Times on December 3rd of this year, went so far as saying, "If Tawana Brawley was to get up and turn and say it was a hoax, I'd say she was lying. We know what happened to her."

---- Ms. Wright, from her own experience, knows what happened to Tawana Brawley is true, even if it isn't true. My head was spinning-how could something false be true?

-----

Patricia Williams, in The Alchemy of Race and Rights, describes the Brawley case in a fashion similar to Wright, except that Williams acknowledges it was hoax. But Williams suggests that it doesn't really matter. For Brawley was the victim of "some unspeakable crime." "No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her-and even if she did it to herself...her condition was clearly the expression of some crime against her, some tremendous violence, some great violence that challenges comprehension."

----

William's argument pitted the facts against the rabid belief that Tawana Brawley's story was true irregardless of the facts, or even if it wasn't true, it didn't matter, because as Brawley herself said at her recent press conference, "what happened to me happens to hundreds of thousands of women every day."

Hundreds of thousands? I was in a maze of smoke and mirrors. The facts were meaningless. I could stand on a soap box in downtown Poughkeepsie and read the grand jury report in its entirety and it wouldn't make a difference. People believed what they wanted to believe. Hearts and minds were long past changing over something as evasive as "the facts."

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I am from Higgins Beach, in Scarborough, Maine, six miles south of Portland. After spending five years as track announcer at Scarborough Downs, I left to study fulltime in graduate school, where my advisor was Akira Iriye. I have a B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. At Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, I teach classes in 20th century US political, constitutional, and diplomatic history; in 2007-8, I was Fulbright Distinguished Chair for the Humanities at Tel Aviv University.

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"From the Scottsboro Boys to Clarence Gideon, some of the most memorable legal narratives have been tales of the wrongly accused. Now “Until Proven Innocent,” a new book about the false allegations of rape against three Duke lacrosse players, can join these galvanizing cautionary tales . . , Taylor and Johnson have made a gripping contribution to the literature of the wrongly accused. They remind us of the importance of constitutional checks on prosecutorial abuse. And they emphasize the lesson that Duke callously advised its own students to ignore: if you’re unjustly suspected of any crime, immediately call the best lawyer you can afford."--Jeffrey Rosen, New York Times Book Review